Think things are bad now under President Trump and the unqualified toadies and rabid right-wingers who are now running, when they are not purposely destroying, the United States government?

Well, of course, they are.

But as awful as these eight months have been, by our reckoning they do not—at least not yet —qualify as the worst times in the United States in our lifetimes. So far, Trump’s second and more unrestrained and more unhinged administration only ranks as the third worst period of our collective lives.

Here’s our ranking of the 10 worst periods in the United States in the past 75 years:

10. McCarthyism

A four-week hearing in 1953 stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer—the "father of the atomic bomb," which helped win World War II—of his security clearance. His sin: having once displayed an interest in Communism.

That was perhaps the apotheosis of the period infected by what we now refer to as McCarthyism. Sen. Joe McCarthy was an alcoholic prone to making unsubstantiated charges that he had “a list” of some number of Communists in some government agency.

McCarthy’s reign of terror lasted from 1950 to 1954. Many people were forced to testify about the political beliefs of colleagues and friends, others had their livelihoods and lives destroyed by the witch hunt.

It was a time of intense paranoia and political repression—a kind of repression we would not see again until, alas, recently.

9. The Great Recession

This severe contraction of the economy, which began in 2008, was triggered by the collapse of a housing bubble and the subprime-mortgage market.

It was the deepest and longest economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression and resulted in a global economic slump that persisted for years.

The unemployment rate more than doubled—to 11 percent. There was more than a 11-trillion-dollar plummet in the net worth of US households.

And the poor were proportionately hit harder than the rich.

8. The Iraq War.

Based upon the false claim that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction, the United States and a few of its allies launched the Iraq War in March 2003. It was a full-scale invasion that did in fact topple the regime of Saddam Hussein, a truly vicious dictator.

The war led to the deaths of about 8,000 American soldiers and contractors and, at a minimum, 100-thousand Iraqis, including many civilians.

And this war contributed to the destabilization of the Middle East over the last two decades.

7. The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

At precisely 1:58 PM central time on November 22, 1963, Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,“ announced to the nation, “we know that President John F. Kennedy has died.” Kennedy was 46—the youngest person ever elected president of the United States.

Cronkite had taken off his glasses, and his eyes were brimming with tears, reflecting the emotion that the entire country felt. It was shocking and unbelievable that this vibrant young president, with a lovely young family, was gone. Along with, for many of us, our innocence.

While this was the most stunning occurrence of our lifetimes, it’s hard to argue it was the most significant: the new president, Lyndon Johnson, continued most of Kennedy’s policies.

Memorandum by President Kennedy’s speech writer, Ted Sorensen, during the Cuban missile crisis

6. The Cuban Missile Crisis

For 13 days in October 1962, the world seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

The United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a standoff over Soviet nuclear-armed missiles placed in Communist Cuba, a Soviet ally, but only 90 miles from the United States.

The Cold War had reached its most anxious moment. If the United States military attempted to destroy the missiles, wouldn’t the Soviet Union feel compelled to respond?

After nearly two weeks of tense negotiations, the two superpowers finally succeeded in avoiding the unthinkable: war between two countries armed with nuclear weapons. The Soviet missiles were withdrawn from Cuba in exchange for the United States withdrawing some missiles near the Soviet Union.

5. The Pandemic

It qualifies as the highest short-term death total ever attributable to a pathogen in the United States. More than 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID-19 since its arrival in the country in early 2020, more reported deaths than in any other country. (China and India likely underreported.)

And, for a time, the entire United States seemed to have ground to a halt. People stopped going to work or school or restaurants or parks. Because the mechanics of the disease’s spread was, initially, misunderstood people mostly stayed inside their homes.

And the economy ground to a halt.

And a generation of kids, of teenagers, of college students was left with a large blank spot in their childhoods.

And resentments built. Were schools and workplaces closed too hastily and too long? Were governments too cautious or not cautious enough.

Some of the effects have lasted: many more now work from home or watch movies at home, and some now work as “digital nomads” from somewhere on the other side of the world. Many meetings are routinely held online.

The age when lives are in part lived not in person but online arrived much faster because of Covid.

4. The Vietnam War.

It wasn’t just one moment in time, nor a 13-day period, nor even a few months of tumultuous events. It was years after years after years of young men slogging through rice paddies, of AK47s and napalm and bombs. It was the draft and the draft lottery, and ever increasing and increasingly unreliable body counts. It was the gigantic and angry demonstrations back home.

Overall, 58,220 American soldiers died in the conflict. There are no reliable numbers for how many Vietnamese perished: maybe one million, maybe three million. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and tens of thousands of Laotians died too.

Perhaps the futility of it all was best captured by that photo of Americans on the roof of the embassy in Saigon, the last Americans escaping a country they had for so long and so futilely, at such unimaginable cost, tried to keep from going Communist.

And today, Vietnam, still ostensibly ruled by the Communist Party, is one of the United States’ biggest trading partners.

3. Trump’s Second Administration

The gloves are off. You’ve witnessed it:

ICE rampaging through and terrorizing neighborhoods.
Innocents deported to gulags.
Charlatans in charge of our health.
Media companies, universities and law firms paying off the tyrant to avoid his wrath.
The president and his family accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from corporations and countries anxious to do business with the United States.
Trump moving to punish his enemies with quasi-legal and extra-legal means.
The poor—at home and abroad—increasingly abandoned.
Our freedoms being rolled back.

No, it would not take much—cancelling elections, for example—for the Trump outrages to move to first place on this list of the most terrible occurrences in the United States in our lifetimes. His second administration, after all, is not even a year old.

2. 9/11

On a clear blue New York morning in 2001, two hijacked airliners crashed into the two towers of the World Trade Center. Before the morning was over, another hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon and a fourth crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania.

Nearly 3,000 people died at all three sites on this horrifying day. Some people who developed cancers are still dying.

September 11 has seared itself not just into our memory but into the way we live as individuals and as a nation.

It led to a still palpable fear, a feeling of vulnerability in a country that has very rarely experienced attacks on its shores. And most of the security checks—to enter buildings or stadiums or airports—remain.

And to ease that fear and sense of vulnerability the United States embarked on a series of often futile military actions, including an unsuccessful, almost 20-year-long war in Afghanistan and that absurd and mostly futile war in Iraq.

9/11 is considered the deadliest terror attack in history.

1. 1968

This was close to peak hippie. Many of us smoked marijuana or took psychedelics for the first time in 1968. Many of us lost our virginity in 1968. This was the year the Beatles’ white album was released, along with the Stones’ “Beggars Banquet,” and The Band’s “Music from Big Pink.”

Yet, this was also a year when, for Americans, the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams.

The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The rioting in city after city. The murder of Bobby Kennedy. The police riot at the Chicago convention. The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. The student revolts across the world. The protests and shootings and controversies at the Mexico City Olympics.

And meanwhile the War in Vietnam raged on. This year, 1968, saw the huge and hugely bloody Tet Offensive by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops.

More US soldiers died in Vietnam in 1968 than in any other year. Indeed, this was a more bloody year for US soldiers than any year in this post-World War II period except 1951 in Korea.

And the Vietnam War led to the deaths of perhaps 150,000, perhaps a quarter of a million Vietnamese in 1968 alone. Among them were the hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians slaughtered on March 16, 1968, by US soldiers in the My Lai massacre.

The Worst Times of Our Lives as Americans